New Wings
by Prudish and Sensible
Summary: Aziraphale's idle experiment yields confusing results. Aziraphale x Crowley slash fic


Aziraphale's idle experiment yields confusing results. Aziraphale x Crowley slash fic

Not quite as polished as I would like but I'm submitting it anyway.

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Aziraphale and Crowley purchased some snacks from a vendor in St. James' Park and found a seat over by the lake. It was a chilly spring day, one of those days that should be warm if winter wasn't being so stubborn. Aziraphale had almost gotten a hot drink but had changed his mind. He jostled the ice around in his cup. There was something he wanted to try.

"Can you heat up the sidewalk?" he asked Crowley.

"Why?"

"It's for a test I was thinking of doing."

Crowley rolled his eyes and did as he was told. It was mostly out of curiosity. Aziraphale rarely ever asked for anything and when he did it was usually prudent to give it to him.

"That's too hot," said Aziraphale.

"Can't you do this by yourself?"

"No, it's important that you do it. Okay, there. Keep it just like that." He fished out a cube of ice from the cup and tossed it on the sidewalk. "Now focus on the ice cube as it melts."

"Is this some sort of angel meditation or are you just wasting my time?"

"Neither, but it doesn't matter anyway since, for us, time isn't much of a limiting factor."

Crowley rested his head in his hand and stared at the ice cube with a look of disinterest. He surreptitiously increased the heat of the sidewalk. Aziraphale nudged him disapprovingly and he put it back to the right temperature.

"And I'm supposed to watch it until it melts? I may be immortal but my time has at least some value."

"I know and I'm sorry," Aziraphale answered truthfully, "but I can't really ask anyone else to help. Even if this doesn't work, it won't take much time to melt. Just stay focused for a little longer please."

Crowley sighed and returned to watching the cube slowly disappear. As he stared at the water pooling around it on the sidewalk, he became aware of a faint smell of mint. It wasn't really a smell but that was the closest thing he could think of to describe it. He didn't know how, but it felt like the ice was dying. Crowley suddenly stopped heating the sidewalk and turned to Aziraphale.

"What is this, angel? You did something to that ice."

"Oh really, Crowley, if you're that against participating, just say so."

"What kind of holy water ice did you get?" Crowley glared defensively at the cup filled with many more potentially blessed minty things.

"You're serious?" said Aziraphale in a worried tone.

Crowley looked back at the melting ice and froze the ground so it would stop releasing what was obviously some kind of divine poison.

"Oh my," Aziraphale said and looked at him in shock. "This can't be good."

"Well that's a relief."

"No, I mean there could be something seriously wrong with me," said the angel. "I was hoping I was just being paranoid. I think I might be sick."

"Angels don't get sick."

"That's part of the problem. Come, you have to take me to my apartment."

"An apartment?" Crowley asked as he followed the angel back towards the parking lot. "But the bookstore was restored. What do you rent an apartment for?"

"I'm not a tenant. I own the building."

The two got into Crowley's car and Aziraphale gave him the address.

"That's a pretty shitty part of town. Why would you buy a building there?"

"It's a little pet project of mine I started in the seventies," admitted the angel. "I'm doing experiments in reverse toxicity."

"That doesn't sound very righteous."

"It would sound better if you were an angel. It's part of my job to find new ways of doing good. You like doing evil using electronics. I'm thinking of doing my holy duty through social engineering. I need to always make sure I'm doing the right thing by helping people. If my aid would lead to someone getting hurt then I would be evil and that's just unacceptable. I'm doing this experiment to examine how a person's potential holiness reacts to the removal of a toxic environment. The preliminary results have been fascinating."

"That still doesn't sound good," Crowley commented.

Aziraphale frowned as they parked. "I may be in a worse condition than I thought then if I can't tell what's good or not."

Aziraphale opened the door to one of the vacant apartments. He crossed the room and opened the window. A holy wind raced over every surface carrying dust trash and a dead rat out onto the street and into a waiting dumpster. Crowley slumped into a chair. Everything in the room looked ancient except for some random stuff from the seventies and that was probably the last time Aziraphale had used that room by the look of it.

"Okay, this should help me rule out some possibilities. Do you feel anything?"

Crowley focused and immediately jumped out of the chair. "Jesus Christ! What are you doing to me?"

Aziraphale looked at him shocked, relieved, and more than a bit scared. This wasn't what he had expected but rather something potentially much worse. He handed Crowley a wooden spoon. He couldn't hold onto it for more than a second. Aziraphale caught it and returned it to the drawer.

"This shouldn't be happening," the angel said. "What does it feel like exactly?"

"You bet your wings this shouldn't be happening! It feels all minty and warm. It's shaking sort of."

"And this?" asked Aziraphale, handing him a statuette.

Crowley immediately shoved the antique back to him. "Hell, does everything in here have this voodoo angel spell on it?"

"It's not a spell. These are all purely human items."

Crowley tried to find a place to stand that didn't feel all clean and fuzzy.

"It's everywhere!"

"Not really," said Aziraphale. "The mattress is relatively new. I would never be able to sleep in here with all this excess stimulation." Crowley sat on the bed and bounced right off. "The blankets however are not new."

Crowley tore all the blankets, sheets, and pillows off the bed and scrunched up in the middle of the mattress like someone waiting out the rain.

"Feel better?"

"Yeah," Crowley said in attempt to nonchalantly cover the fact that he was panicking just a second ago. "Why does an angel like you have a room full of things made of toothpaste and silk? I normally like creepy things but this is just sick."

"You shouldn't be able to feel anything."

"Well you're wrong! A moment ago the whole room felt like baby tribbles eating breath mints."

"That's a much too accurate description of love for you to be making things up."

Crowley lowered his sunglasses. "Demons don't feel love. You know that. It must be something else. Maybe it's gas."

"I thought it was me at first and that somehow my abilities had become distorted, but now I'm not so sure. Every item in this room was loved by its previous owner. I used to enjoy collecting the strongest ones as a hobby. This is purely human love separate from my divine influence. You are feeling love."

"Demons don't do that!"

"Perhaps you're just picking up on some other human attribute in them, but it certainly sounds like love. Are you sure it's mint and not candy? Flowers are common."

"It's definitely not flowers."

"There should be a distinct sound of red, sometimes there is a feeling of grass."

"No, it feels like freshly groomed purring cats."

"Hmm, small creatures, that could mean a lot of things," the angel said a little more cheerfully. "Sit back. I need to try something. Lie down and don't move. This is going to be a bit tricky."

Aziraphale put his hands on the demon's chest and went silent. Crowley let him do his thing for a while but soon got impatient.

"So, what's the verdict, doc?"

"I don't know yet."

"That's reassuring."

"This isn't simple. Now hush and try to relax."

Crowley closed his eyes and tried to stay still. He was completely trapped in by all the minty things, but at least it wasn't so bad on the bed. He was almost getting used to it.

"This isn't working. I don't feel a thing," he grumbled.

Aziraphale didn't answer. He was deep in concentration. He drew on his reserved power, that part of him that he always kept aside to maintain his human appearance.

"Oh wow, you're really going all out with this one," said Crowley. "I haven't seen you let your wings show since the apocalypse didn't happen. You must have gotten weaker over the years. Old age getting to you. I get it."

"No you don't understand. I need to be in my natural form. This is extremely delicate. If I mess up…. Well, I don't know what will happen but I would rather not find out. I can't just rush through this. You're powerful. It's like playing jump rope with electrified barbed wire."

"What the hell are you doing inside me?!"

"Aha, found it, or at least something similar. Tell me if you can feel this."

"No."

Aziraphale made a correction and tried again with no response. It was a confusing result. He switched out variables associated with different kinds of love, but nothing worked. Eventually he shrugged his shoulders and smiled.

"I guess you're not feeling love after all. You must have—"

"Oh…" whispered Crowley as a sensation rolled over him in an overpowering crescendo.

"You can feel that?" asked Aziraphale surprised. "How bad is it?"

"…Oh…"

"Crowley? Are you okay?"

"Wow."

Slowly the feeling subsided as Aziraphale withdrew his hands. Crowley felt so drained that he couldn't move anything but his eyes. He looked over at the angel.

"That felt… fuzzy."

Aziraphale didn't look at him. He had a puzzled expression on his face. His cheeks blushed.

"So what does it mean?" asked Crowley.

"It means it's not just any love you feel." Aziraphale covered his face so Crowley couldn't see his skin turn bright red. "It's just mine. You felt the ice melting because of my love for the experiment. You feel the auras in my collection because I cherish them."

"So… that means?"

"It would normally mean that you love me."

"Oh," said Crowley slowly.

"You're not a demon at all are you?" shouted Aziraphale, jumping to a conclusion that made more sense.

"Bull shit! I'm a demon!" Crowley bolted upright. The vertigo was not nearly enough to counter his rage. "Don't you dare—"

"Then how do you explain all that love you're hiding in your body?" Aziraphale interrupted.

"That must be yours! You put it in there just now!"

"I did not!"

"Fine, you must have been sneaking in little bits over time and now it's all clogging my arteries."

Aziraphale opened his mouth to make a retort but stopped as a horrible notion occurred to him.

"Actually, that could be true," he said cautiously. They both sat in silence for a while until Aziraphale said. "But then wouldn't the reverse be true? Have I absorbed any of your malignance?"

"How should I know? I'm not some sort of thermometer. How do you expect me to go about measuring your level of corruption?"

"Do the same thing to me as I did to you."

"I'm not an angel. I can't do that sort of thing. We do lust not love."

"Well do that then. If you can make me feel lust then I'll know I've been corrupted."

"Are you serious?" Crowley laughed. "Wait a second. Since angels don't feel lust then doesn't that make you…?"

"Six thousand years is a long time," said Aziraphale cutting him off. "I've been married to a few humans before. By holding back my power, I'm physically capable of being intimate, but I get no exceptional pleasure out of it. I mainly did it to see the joy it brought to my partner."

"Wow, sucks to be you."

"Are you going to help me or not?" asked Aziraphale flatly.

"Sex with an angel?" Crowley hissed. "How could I pass that up?" A truly vicious smile appeared on his face. "Remember you asked for this." He roughly flipped Aziraphale over on his stomach. He took the angel's wings in one hand. The other hand dematerialized their clothing.

"Wait stop that hurts!" the angel cried.

"I don't care what you say. I'm gonna…" Crowley froze. He slowly let go of Aziraphale's wings and rolled listlessly onto his back, covering his eyes with his forearm. "Damn it, I do care. What kind of lame demon am I who can't even rape someone properly? Am I losing it? I used to be so good at this. How long has it been?"

Aziraphale got on his hands and knees and hovered over Crowley. "It's okay. You can keep going. I think I might have felt something there."

"No you didn't."

"Okay, what I felt wasn't lust but I want you to try again. I have to know if I can feel it. Just be gentler this time."

"Demons aren't gentle."

"Then try being manipulative instead? That's kind of like being gentle."

Crowley smiled. "Ah, now that I can do." He pulled the angel down on top of him. He reached up, slid his hands over Aziraphale's back, and massaged the joint between his wing and body. "I wasn't very nice to these wings. Let me fix that." He caressed the soft feathers making Aziraphale's wings spring to attention. "You like that don't you?"

Aziraphale looked away, blushed, and mumbled something.

"Oh the virtue of honesty is a wonderful thing," Crowley murmured teasingly. "What does it feel like?"

"It's a bit like metal. I can't really describe it. I feel like there should be a sound but I can't hear it."

"Weird, I've never heard lust described that way. Maybe you're not tainted after all."

Crowley passed his hands down Aziraphale's back and landed on his butt. He gave it a little squeeze that made the angel gasp and push away.

"Wait, stop!"

"Do you really want me to stop? I'm being as gentle as I can. This was your idea anyway. It's not like you haven't done this before."

"But never with a demon! It feels so different, like electricity through a wire. I just don't know."

Aziraphale lowered himself onto Crowley's chest and tried to relax. Their faces were so close that he could see every detail in the other's eyes. The demon hastily turned his head away, but the damage was done. Crowley couldn't forget the expression of divine love on the angel's face. Those vibrant eyes made him feel fuzzy inside and he wasn't about to sit idly by and let himself be loved like that. He pulled out more of his demonic energy to compensate. He grinned wildly at the squeak the angel made.

"What was that?" Aziraphale asked.

"Just my tail." Crowley slid it along his thighs.

"That's not your demon tail is it? It feels more like your snake tail. I'm glad you're taking this seriously but you're reverting more than I thought you would. I'll have to step it up or you'll hurt me."

A soft breeze flowed through Crowley's hair and tickled his cheeks. Aziraphale's gentle hands caressed his face and neck. Those loving eyes swept him away. He needed to balance it and quick. He slipped his tail between the angel's legs and slid it up his crack. At the exact same time, Aziraphale decided to kiss him in a way that was unlike anything either of them had ever felt before.

The effect was instantaneous. Aziraphale's wings exploded outwards filling the whole room with heavenly light. A holy wind blew through his hair and wings, scattering pure white feathers in the air. Crowley wrapped his arms around the completely weightless angel lest he drift away.

Crowley's own wings had grown to full size as well. He used them to anchor Aziraphale to him. Somehow he knew that no good would come out of letting him go. Soon the explosion of power abated and Aziraphale's body went limp. Free from danger, Crowley let his wings and hands droop back onto the bed.

"Aziraphale," he panted. "What was— what happened? That was— unreal."

"I don't know. Nothing like that has ever happened to me before."

The two of them lay together for a few minutes they just trying to breathe. Aziraphale grabbed onto Crowley's wings to stop himself from floating away. Crowley weakly wrapped them around him once again.

"Thanks," said Aziraphale. "I never thought your wings could get big enough to do that. You look exhausted."

Crowley did a quick tally of his body parts. His skin was a ruddy shade of red. He prodded at his demon fangs with his forked tongue.

"Do I have horns?"

Aziraphale smiled. "And the glowing eyes too. Your ears are even pointy."

"Just great," Crowley groaned. "It's going to take days before I've regained enough power to change my body back to the way I like it. I can't go out like this."

"Am I just as bad?"

"Let's see, you're weightless and your skin is practically shining. Your hair is platinum blond and you haven't worn a halo like that since the Rococo period."

Crowley passed his fingers through Aziraphale's weightless hair. It seemed to move to a faint heavenly breeze. Ethereal wisps of silk streamed out behind him with the same eerie slowness as the rest. He lazily caressed his soft feathers.

"That's strange," Crowley muttered patting the whole of Aziraphale's back just to double check. His face settled into a look of faint disbelief. "You're an archangel?"

"That's probably the sweetest thing you've ever said to me."

"No, I'm serious. You have freaky mutant wings."

Aziraphale pushed himself out of Crowley's grasp and almost hit the celling. He reached around to check but the movement hurt him too much. He flailed in the air for a second before floating over to an antique standing mirror. The momentum made him drift awkwardly. All these years he had taken gravity for granted and now it was getting its revenge. Aziraphale looked at his reddened back in the mirror.

"Oh my…"

"You never told me you were an archangel." Crowley said.

"I wasn't an archangel before! Oh, this is bad."

"Why?"

"An archangel having sex with a demon is one of the signs of the apocalypse! It's all going to happen again! People are going to know it's me!"

"I don't consider what we did as sex, but if you're so worried about it, just don't tell them. Angels don't lie but you don't have to always tell the truth."

"God will know!"

"Oh well, nothing you can do about that. Maybe you should ask the big guy to cut you a break since you saved the world and all. Now that you've been promoted to archangel, he'll have to listen to you."

"And what if he doesn't? That's not how it works."

"Then you always have the option of falling. Don't worry, I'll catch you."

"I'm not going to just fall on purpose!"

Aziraphale floated out of view of the mirror, his new wings billowing despondently in the divine breeze. He dug his fingers in his hair and shivered with anxiety. Crowley snatched his foot out of the air as he passed and towed the angel back to the bed. He couldn't deal with a moody angel and that furry minty smell at the same time. He desperately wanted to get out of this room but he was too exhausted to do anything about it. He pulled down Aziraphale on his back. The angel winced and turned over.

"Your wings hurt?" Crowley asked.

"My whole back hurts."

Crowley tried to move the wings out of the way so he could see Aziraphale's back but there were feathers everywhere and he kept floating away. Crowley turned sideways and shifted himself as far on top of the angel as his feeble limbs would allow. He parted Aziraphale's wings.

"Yeah it looks pretty bad, like someone's been hitting you with a plank." Crowley momentarily fantasized about doing just that as he drew his hands over the angel's back. "Maybe you're not even an archangel after all. I knew a demon who had an extra set of fangs. He lorded it over us for a month before the old set fell out. Apparently there are flukes like that."

"Did he hurt this bad too?"

"Not that I could tell."

"What makes the least sense is that this has happened at all," said Aziraphale. "No one can become an archangel. It's not a promotion like you said. They are created that way. They have extra powers and knowledge from the beginning that other angels don't have."

"Maybe it has something to do with you having wild kinky sex with me just now."

"Stop patronizing me. I know you caused it. The question is why. I'm not the only angel to bed a demon, not by a long shot. This never happened to any of them. All they got was divine retribution. What kind of messed up punishment is this?"

"I don't know. God always seemed a little unstable to me at the best of times."

"Just because you don't understand doesn't mean he is any less ineffable."

"Can't you just go and talk to him?"

Aziraphale gave him a cold one eyed stare. God was a bit like the Queen in a way. Normal people just didn't go to see Him. You can't just call up the President of the United States and ask him why there's always so much construction on the freeway. There are reasons people pray to the saints.

Crowley shrugged his shoulders and continued to gently rub Aziraphale's back in vain hopes that one set of wings was just stuck on and all this archangel junk would just be a joke and an embarrassing memory. He could clearly tell the new ones apart from the old ones on top. The lower wings had a pale pink tint to them. The skin around them looked like it had been scalded by the explosive force of spontaneous existence. Crowley thought of getting a wet washcloth but with his luck the tap would dispense holy water. Too drained to materialize one, Crowley resorted to using his tongue. Aziraphale made a highly satisfying squeak and smiled at him softly. Crowley could only see one eye, but still the condensed love made his head spin. It rattled his whole body with a shock of intense happiness. He licked him again and grinned when he heard Aziraphale sigh. Being loved felt amazing. Feathers circled around him so warm and fresh.

"I need to sleep," said Aziraphale.

"You're a heavenly being," said Crowley, reluctantly shifting off of him. "You don't actually need to sleep."

"Right now I do. This is all just too much to take right now. I need to calm down and get this out of my head for a while."

"I guess that does sound nice."

"Will you stay here for a while?"

"It's not like I can actually go anywhere looking like Batman with sunburn."

"Oh, I'm sure you have friends you can call."

"And how do you propose I explain the sudden relapse? They'll want to know what kind of cataclysmic evil I must have done in order for me to end up like this. Even if I say I tainted an angel, they won't believe me. I'm not a lesser demon here. It would take a god damned angel orgy to leave me this drained under normal circumstances. They'll wonder why I'm not covered in feathers and glitter."

Aziraphale laughed and nuzzled under Crowley's chin.

"It'll only be for the night. You can wake me up in the morning and I'll help you work something out."

Crowley smiled in a way that he would never want to show when Aziraphale might see him. It felt so right to have the angel this close to him.

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TBC


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